November 2016 – CHRISTCHURCH, NZ– A powerful 7.8–magnitude earthquake rocked New Zealand’s South Island on Sunday, triggering high waves and a tsunami warning as people fled buildings in a panic. The quake struck around 50 kilometers (around 30 miles) northeast of the city of Christchurch, the US Geological Survey recorded, while waves of 2.49 meters above usual tide levels were measured near the epicenter by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC). The country’s entire east coast is at threat of dangerous waves that could arrive immediately, the New Zealand Civil Defense said on Twitter in an advisory. “Move inland or to higher ground immediately,” the warning said.

And at least three aftershocks hit near South Island, the USGS said, some with a magnitude as high as 6.2. “This is the strongest [earthquake] I’ve ever felt,” Tamara Hunt told CNN. She was with her husband at their home in Whanganui when the earthquake struck. “It started off so small, like the cat moving in the bed, but then it started building and I had to run to the door. Stuff in the house was falling over and the doors were swaying really bad,” she said. “Then we decided to get out, and that’s when we saw our pool had lost a lot of water. The earthquake went on for two minutes.”

The city of Christchurch was devastated by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in 2011, which killed 185 people and injured thousands. It reduced swathes of the city’s historic area to rubble. “The land has been very peaceful for many, many months. So this is bringing back all the rare memories,” Chet Wah, owner of Designer Cottage B&B in Christchurch, told CNN. “I just checked with all the guests. They are alright. It is scary. It’s going to be a long night.”

The USGS initially reported the quake’s magnitude at 7.4 at a depth of just 10 kilometers — shallow enough to cause serious destruction to the immediate surrounding area. It later revised the quake strength to 7.8, but changed its depth to 23 (14.2 miles) kilometers, giving more of a buffer between the epicenter and the Earth’s surface. New Zealand is regularly hit by earthquakes as it sits in a “collision zone” between the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. It is part of the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” where many earthquakes and volcano eruptions occur. –CNN

November 2016 – TEXAS– Some upper-income Texans are headed down below, not Australia, but in an large underground bunker complex. An investor group is planning for a doomsday scenario by building a $300 million luxury community underground replete with the latest leisure amenities like a golf course and shooting range. The development, called Trident Lakes, is in a little town called Ector, which is just northeast of Dallas. Residents will enjoy an equestrian center, 18-hole golf course, polo fields, zip lines and gun ranges. Retail shops, restaurants and a row of helipads are also in the works. For those looking to “get away,” they’ll also be able to enjoy three white sand beaches and a neighborhood spa.

“We’ve evolved it into long-term sustainability instead of a survival community,” Trident Lakes CEO Jim O’Connor told the Houston Chronicle, adding that the 400 planned condos will house about 1,600 people. “The concept is to build a community that will last two centuries or longer. That means we’re looking at designs that include earth structures that won’t be exposed to the elements.” Residents will first be able to move-in possibly as soon as 2018, O’Connor said, with construction slated to potentially begin next year.

“It’s not just a hole in the ground to hide in — it’s going to be one of the most plush resorts in all of Texas, if not America,” Trident Lakes spokesperson Richie Whitt told the Sherman Herald Democrat. “People are getting fearful of this world — there’s ISIS, there are things like Zika virus to race relation and the police brutality they see on TV — people are nervous. People want a place they can have safety for themselves and for the future of their families,” Whitt added. “If need be, it’s going to be one of the safest places on Earth.”

November 2016 – SIGN OF THE TIMES – In case of an election night Doomsday, preppers are running up sales of emergency survival food. While sales for “long term food” typically see an increase around natural disasters and elections, “this is more intense than what we saw in 2012,” said Keith Bansemer, VP of marketing for My Patriot Supply, a manufacturer and seller of survival food. During the previous election his company saw sales double. This time it’s triple. “We have everyone we can on the phones,” he said. “We are overwhelmed.”

Purchases at other long term food supply companies are up as well. Emergency preparedness online store The Epicenter reports a 6 percent uptick in year over year sales. Another company, Legacy Foods, predicts they’ll see a 1-2 week spike in sales after the election — if Hillary Clinton wins, said owner Phil Cox. The meals, sold by the plastic bucket or tote bin, are typically dehydrated or freeze-dried food in sealed military-grade Mylar packs. Menu items include pasta primavera, Hawaiian Style Sweet n’ Sour, cheesy broccoli and rice soup, orange energy drink mix and chocolate pudding. They’re sold in bundles based on how long they’ll feed you.

For $2,000 spent at Legacy Foods, you could eat three square meals a day for an entire year. That’s 1,080 servings. The Epicenter has a 14-day supply kit for $235 that’s recently been “selling really well,” said owner Bryan Nelson. The most popular entry-level seller at My Patriot Supply is a 3-month supply for $497. It comes a in nondescript gray slim line totes bin designed to be easy to stack in the back of a closet or slip under your bed. Big name retailers are in on the game. Costco sells a 1-month supply of 390 servings in plastic gallon buckets for $114.99. Wal-Mart has a bucket deal, too. What’s feeding this new urgency? Survivalist consumers says they’re preparing for post-election unrest that could involve everything from massive riots, to power grid outages, to the total collapse of the financial system where a can of food becomes currency.

And it’s not just guys digging a hole on their farm and filling it with MRE’s who are driving sales, companies say, but schoolteachers, moms, and successful financial planners. Nor is it limited to just rural areas. “Frederick Reddie,” a 41-year-old “urban prepper” from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is stocking up on staples like rice and peanut butter and working on expanding his 6-month supply of emergency food to two years. He has to use a pseudonym to protect his supply from any future hungry neighbors, he told NBC News. Reddie predicts a Trump win that has the urban poor revolting across the nation and the imposition of martial law to quell riots and the burning of businesses. But he’s also getting ready for the possibility of a Clinton victory that he says could lead to conflict with Russia and “World War 3 in 2017.”

Either way, Freddy’s ready – with both supplies and a word of advice. “At minimum stock up your cabinets as if you knew a hurricane was coming,” he said. “It’ll be like a hurricane that could touch every city in America.” The companies take pains to point out that they sell food not just for the collapse of civilization but also for camping, outdoor recreation, and natural disaster preparedness, like Ebola or volcanoes. Their customers are careful, self-sufficient and pragmatic types, they say, students of history who know things like stock market bubbles and crashes go in cycles and are taking small, meaningful steps, to reassert control over a toxic election. They’re always thinking ahead.

Cans of food that last 25 years are “better than money in the bank,” said Nelson. “If you think the value of money is going to go down, then you could convert dollars into something tangible that you can use later” for either eating or barter. Bansemer said that his customers don’t necessarily fear a specific election outcome, but change itself. “You hear them saying, no matter who wins, I know I could take a positive step myself and secure what’s important,” he said. “They’re securing their food supply.” –NBC News

November 2016– ROME – Increased activity below the earth’s surface suggests volcano just 10 km from the Italian capital is getting close to another eruption. A dormant volcano just outside Rome could be slowly reawakening, scientists have said, raising fears of a Pompeii-style ash-and-rock cloud sweeping across the Italian capital. A dormant volcano just outside Rome could be slowly reawakening, scientists have said, raising fears of a Pompeii-style ash-and-rock cloud sweeping across the Italian capital. An eruption in the Colli Albani Volcanic District (CAVD), which is around 10 km from Rome, would have a devastating impact on much of the city.

In a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, an international team of researchers reported that the ground in the region is rising by 2-3 mm per year and underground chambers located several kilometers below the towns of Ariccia, Castel Gandolfo and Albano are filling up with magma – signs that the previously dormant volcano is rumbling back to life. Satellite imagery and seismographic charts also record the volcano’s slow awakening. However, while the volcano’s increased activity is a cause for concern, experts believe a possible eruption could still be 1,000 years away. Previous studies have suggested the volcano tends to erupt around every 40,000 years.

But now scientists believe that could be narrowed to 30,000 years – bringing the prospect of an eruption much closer. If the volcano did erupt, it would produce a huge cloud raining down ash and lava on parts of Rome. The cloud would obscure the sun in countries as far away as Latin America, scientists believe. Experts say the long gaps between eruptions are a cause for concern because they allow time for large quantities of magma to build up and pressure to mount below the earth’s surface. This means the eventual eruption is likely to be bigger and more powerful. “When the eruption happens, it has an explosive effect, like opening a champagne bottle after shaking it,” Fabrizio Marra, who led the study, told La Repubblica. “This sort of process has, for example, caused the string of earthquakes that hit this area at the beginning of the 1990s, with minor quakes and a few cases of magnitude four quakes.” Mr. Marra said people living near the volcano should not fear an eruption – at least not yet.

The more imminent threat is from earthquakes triggered by the increased activity under the earth’s crust. Earthquakes can, in certain circumstances, trigger volcanic eruptions but this is not currently a risk in Rome because the volcano is still too far away from its next eruption. Mr. Marra said: “It has been ascertained that a seismic event could trigger a volcanic eruption, as happened in the US with Mount St Helens. But it can only happen with a volcano on the verge of erupting, at these levels there is no possible disturbance that could reach the magma chambers.”

The team, from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, mapped 600,000 years of the region’s history and assessed the habits of the volcano. They concluded that the cycle of past eruptions suggest another is due within the next 1,000 years – a finding in line with the increased volcanic activity in the region. The warning comes as Italy’s biggest earthquake in 36 years left more than 15,000 people homeless in and around the town of Norcia in central Italy. A number of historic buildings were damaged or destroyed by the 6.6 magnitude quake. In August, 200 people were killed by a slightly smaller earthquake that hit the nearby village of Accumoli. –Independent

November 2016– ITALY – A researcher has discovered a crack, which is ten kilometers long and is up to half a meter tall in the Italian mountain, which is just 40kms away from where a 6.5 magnitude earthquake struck on Sunday in Norcia. The researcher Paolo Marco De Martini said that it was the biggest deformation he had seen since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, which left 2,483 people dead and 7,700 injured.

Mr. De Martini said that the crack “coincides with the seismic fault that generated the earthquake. He said: “Underground rocks are much more compressed, but on the surface, rupture caused by the earthquake tends to open up a bit like a fan. “That is why along ten kilometers of fracture, we also observe cracks that run parallel to the main one, dozens or sometimes hundreds of meters away.”

Many landmarks in Rome were damaged by the 6.5 magnitude earthquake that struck on Sunday morning. Cracks have even appeared in the city’s iconic Coliseum. More than 30,000 people have been left homeless following the earthquake on Sunday, which was the most powerful to hit the country since 1980. The geologists say that they must act quickly to investigate the cracks because they could become filled with snow making it impossible to explore them. –Express